American Girls As We Want Them to Be

When I was eight years old, my older sister began to subscribe to Seventeen. I was very jealous. Having outgrown Cricket, I had no magazine to read and had to content myself with flipping through my parents’ National Geographic or sneaking into Leanne’s room to look at Seventeen. Never one to be outdone, I decided to create my own magazine, Eight. I spent days laboring over the cover art, crayoning a girl, with magenta-streaked hair and pink glasses (like me), standing in a black sweatsuit with purple trim (like me), sporting jellies on her feet and plastic bangles on her arm (like me), clasping a kitten and a book in her hands (again, like me).

The articles I wrote for Eight, however, did not have very much to do with me at all. They were modeled after the articles in my sister’s magazine, all about dates (which I would not go on for another six years), earrings (which my parents did not allow me to have for another two years), and make-up (which I still do not wear very often). I missed American Girl, which was launched by Pleasant Company in 1992, by a scant eight years. Now, girls seven to twelve have a magazine of their very own.

The magazine is not Pleasant Company’s only product, of course. Most famous, and ubiquitous, among their merchandise is the American Girls Collection, billed in promotional material as “Books, Dolls, Dresses, and Other Delights.” The heroines of the American Girls Collection are nine-year-old girls from different historical moments: Felicity, living in pre-Revolutionary Virginia; Josefina, introduced last fall, a New Mexican girl in 1824 (when New Mexico was still part of Mexico); Kirsten, a Swedish immigrant to Minnesota in 1854; Addy, a Southern slave who escapes to Philadelphia with her mother; Samantha, a wealthy Victorian orphan from New York; and Molly, a bespectacled midwesterner waiting out World War II.

Instilling confidence in girls— and it is around age nine that girls “hit the wall” regarding self-esteem, body image, and math smarts— is an unabashed aim of Pleasant Company, and for that we should shout its praises from the rooftops.

And then there are the dolls, one of each girl, which can be purchased, along with one paperback book, for $82. The dolls arrive clad in period apparel, with accessories sold separately. The Kirsten doll, for example, is dressed in a blue calico dress topped by a red-and-white striped apron, stockings, pantlettes, and brown lace-up boots. Her accessories include an embroidered handkerchief, a spoon-bag with a wooden spoon, an amber-colored heart necklace, and a red-and-white checked bonnet. Pleasant Company offers eight additional Kirsten outfits, as well as a doll-sized school bench, a wooden oval lunchbox, a slate with a slate pencil and a ruler, a Saint Lucia tray with two Saint Lucia buns and a sprig of greenery, a trestle table with matching chairs, stoneware dishes and wooden bowls, a friendship quilt, a fishing rod and bait (and even trout to catch), a washstand and bed, a candle and candlestick, a foot stove, a bird whistle, two stoneware crocks for collecting honey, and more. The entire collection, plus doll hair and skin-care kits, can be purchased for just over $1,000.

Your Felicity doll can be made to feel at home by the purchase of a travel trunk, a hand-held fire screen, a lantern, a shuttlecock and battledore, a guitar, a needlework frame, a tea table and chairs, a hornbook, an inkwell, and a writing chair modeled after the one Thomas Jefferson is believed to have perched upon when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Addy collectors can acquire a lazy Susan table and ladder-back chairs, a copper pitcher, an ice-cream maker, a striped school satchel, a cutter sled, a wooden bandbox, and a sweet potato pudding kit. Real girls can buy period clothing in sizes 6X to 16, including nighties, Victorian party dresses, and a Swedish Saint Lucia Wreath.

If selling these “Dresses, and Other Delights” is one goal of the American Girls series, there are two additional, more noble goals: to teach girls about American history (scrupulously researched and impeccably accurate, we are told), and to present positive role models, in the form of Felicity and company, for today’s girls. On the second count, these books succeed: if the characters are at times a bit saccharine, they are nonetheless spunky, resilient, assertive, and creative.

Pleasant Company supplements the American Girls Collection with books, dolls, and “Other Delights” related to contemporary girls; in addition to the magazine mentioned above, there are “American Girl of Today” dolls, designed to show readers that “you’re a part of history, too!” In lieu of pantaloons and snowshoes, you can dress your doll in a Kwanza outfit, present her with a violin and a book of Christmas tunes, give her a gong to strike on the Chinese New Year, or show her how to light a miniature menorah and spin a small dreidel.

The American Girl Library, not to be confused with the American Girl Collection, features books that give girls tips about slumber parties (yes, you can also purchase an American Girl sleeping bag and slumber party kit), etiquette, and how to tackle problems ranging from divorce to annoying little sisters.

Instilling confidence in girls—and it is around age nine that girls “hit the wall” regarding self-esteem, body image, and math smarts—is an unabashed aim of Pleasant Company, and for that we should shout its praises from the rooftops. The books are less successful at teaching U.S. history. In part, this is because the goal of offering good role models sometimes conflicts with the imperatives of accurate history. What the staff of Pleasant Company thinks about girlhood does not accord with what antebellum educators thought girls should learn or even with the prescriptions of 1950s etiquette books. For example, attending school is a central part of the books in the American Girls Collection, although throughout American history many girls never attended school: one recent estimate suggests that in 1850, only half of white, school-aged girls went to school.

Felicity, who lives in Williamsburg in 1774, is the clearest example of the clash between role model and history. Somewhat reminiscent of Jo March, Felicity constantly bucks the stereotypes of her day. Although she knows that she ought to be assisting her mother cook and mend at home, Felicity prefers to help out in her father’s store. Always squirming in her too tightly laced stays and tripping on the hems of her dresses, Felicity sneaks a pair of breeches from the apprentice who is boarding with her family and wears them on nighttime rides on her beloved horse, Penny. That most girls in colonial Williamsburg never found their way into a pair of pants, real or symbolic, receives scant mention in the stories; what a reader will remember is that Felicity Merriman, with her gumption and spark, could more or less do whatever she wanted.

Indeed, according to the Felicity Teacher’s Guide, independence is the major theme of the stories:

One theme stands out in all six books about Felicity: the longing for independence. The colonies and young Felicity both strive for independence . …Just as Penny struggles against [her original owner] Mr. Nye’s cruelty and the confines of the tether and fenced pasture, Felicity struggles for independence by trying to tame a wild horse, even though she’s rebelling against what her parents and society expect of her. Felicity’s and Penny’s struggles mirror the one taking place among colonists as they consider wresting their freedom from England.

In the first book, we learn that Penny, the horse, earned her name because of her shiny copper coat, but also because “she’s an independent-minded horse, that’s for certain. Call her Penny for the independence, too.” In the second book, Felicity’s father stops selling tea at his store or drinking it at home to protest the tea tax, and Felicity has to decide whether or not she will take tea at her daily lessons with Miss Manderly, where tea-time is the central ritual of the girl’s day.

Throughout the Felicity books, notions of freedom work on two levels—Felicity’s freedom from social expectations, and the colonies’ freedom from England. Arguably the most important characters in the story of eighteenth-century American freedom are left out: slaves. That slaves used the Revolutionary War to launch their own bid for freedom is not hinted at in these books, nor do the stories evince any awareness that the independence of white people like the Merrimans depended on black slavery. Rose, the Merrimans’ cook, is never referred to as a slave, and Marcus is described as “the man who helps Mr. Merriman at home and at the store.” The six-page nonfictional “Peek into the Past” that follows the first Felicity story reminds the reader that black slaves constituted half of colonial Williamsburg’s population, but one would never know that from the story itself—and most of the nine-year-old readers I’ve asked have even allowed as how they rarely read the “Peek into the Past” sections anyway.

If the American Girls Collection’s treatment of slavery is less than satisfactory, so too is its discussion of free working people. Connie Porter, the author of the Addy books, deserves credit for emphasizing the struggles, economic and otherwise, of free black workers in the North; freedom, Porter reminds us throughout the books, has its costs. But the working girl in the Samantha books leaves the reader with quite a different impression.

Samantha, a rich, sometimes idle, New Yorker, befriends Nellie, the help next door. Through Samantha’s eyes, the reader learns about the hardships of Nellie’s life—learns that Nellie has developed an irritating cough from working in a factory, that her parents cannot afford food and coal, that her five-person family crowds into one room of a New York slum. Never fear: when, in the final book, Nellie’s parents die, Samantha’s aunt and uncle save Nellie from orphanhood and poverty by adopting her. The ending is happy, but it is not more realistic than Annie.

Only when she is adopted by Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia does Nellie become a true American Girl. Nellie the poor servant could never be the heroine of her own American Girls’ books. Nellie did not own eight different outfits, so how could a Nellie doll sell eight doll outfits? Nor could Pleasant Company develop a Nellie line of doll furniture or jewelry or playthings. Samantha’s Paper Dolls: Samantha and Her Old-Fashioned Outfits for You to Cut Out and Samantha’s Cook Book: A Peek at Dining in the Past with Meals You Can Cook Today are available as part of the American Girls Pastimes collection, but even Pleasant Company would be hard pressed to market a cookbook about a girl whose family could not afford food.

It does not seem coincidental that by the end of the first Addy book, Addy escapes from slavery—where she sleeps on a cornhusk pallet and has no playthings save a rag doll named Janie—to freedom, where she gradually acquires “fancy dresses,” school supplies, and toys. Bearing this in mind, one need only flip through the Pleasant Company catalog to understand why unrepresentative and uncritical presentations of material culture pervade the American Girls stories.

Pleasant Company’s goal to turn their readership into not only historically informed, assertive girls but also into consumers of clothing and dolls not only determines what stories get told in the American Girls Collection but also limits the company’s vision of girlhood. Pleasant Company relies upon an association of women with consumption that dates at least back to Felicity’s time. That Pleasant Company seeks to undo so many other stereotypes about girls while relying on this very basic construction of girls and women as consumers is, to say the least, troubling. Selling the “Dolls, Dresses, and Other Delights,” it seems, is more important to Pleasant Company than either challenging contemporary stereotypes about what it means to be female or teaching about the past.

Nor is religion immune from Pleasant Company’s commercial thrust. The treatment of religion in the American Girls Collection is limited primarily to Christmas, which is the subject of the third book in every series. (The exception is the Addy books, wherein the church plays a somewhat larger role; author Connie Porter rightly emphasizes the importance of the church in free African American communities.)

The main message of each of the Christmas stories seems to be that the point of the holiday is to give dolls to little girls. The Josefina Christmas story turns on Josefina’s older sister passing down to her a doll named Nina. Molly’s Christmas revolves around opening a package, sent by her father from the front, that contains her Christmas present—a doll in a smart red cape. And Felicity receives an extravagant doll in a handmade blue silk dress during Christmastide. It would come as no surprise to learn that Pleasant Company does a very brisk business in the pre-Christmas season.

Finally, it cannot be said that the books in the American Girls Collection will overwhelm the reader with their literary merit. If Working Woman magazine has selected Pleasant T. Rowland as one of their Top 50 Women Business Owners three years in a row, the Newbery and Caldecott committees will not be bestowing honors on her company’s books any time soon. Nor, I suspect, will any of the books in the similar series that have been spawned by the popularity of the American Girls (Scholastic’s Dear America series or Aladdin Paperbacks’ American Diaries, for instance) garner such encomiums.

There are children’s books that combine historical accuracy and literary quality without sacrificing readability—consider for example, Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy, a Newbery Medal-winning book about a young girl in medieval England. Or, An Enemy Among Them, a novel for kids about conflicting loyalties during the Revolutionary War that is the product of a collaboration between noted children’s writer Deborah H. Deford and historian Harry S. Stout. The next time your daughter or student or cousin or niece is clamoring for a book about Felicity and friends, you might introduce her to Mary E. Lyons’s Keeping Secrets: The Girlhood Diaries of Seven Women Writers or Letters from a Slave Girl: The Story of Harriet Jacobs. Or you might even fall back on that tried-but-true classic of children’s literature, The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

Pleasant Rowland has commented on numerous occasions that her mission is to give children the chocolate cake with their vitamins.

But books such as Lyons’s belie the myth that children require “dolls and other delights” to make history come alive for them. In Keeping Secrets, for example, Lyons, a former public-school teacher and librarian, weaves together her own insights into the lives of Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Forten, and Ida B. Wells with excerpts from their diaries. By including these primary sources—the historian’s bread and butter—Lyons invites her audience to offer their own interpretations. Lyons’s readers are thus encouraged not to imbibe the story of the past passively but to participate in the historian’s craft.

The books in the American Girls Collection don’t attain that standard, but their enormous popularity is not unmitigated bad news. If the American Girls are far from perfect, they are a clear step in the right direction. Addy and Samantha are vast improvements over Barbie.

Lauren F. Winner is Kellett Scholar at Clare College, Cambridge University.